Personalized PLM Tool - make it yours!

Lately I’ve been thinking about how you could make people adapt and embrace an enterprise system such as PLM. And those thoughts got me to ask these questions - How can you get a feeling of my PLM system? And how far do you need to go to get there?

An email application allows the user to categorize and label emails. A “Todo” application allows the user to categorize, label, set alarms, and flag tasks/todo. And cloud-solutions like Salesforce CRM that are built for flexibility allows the user some flexibility on the user interface and what information to focus on.

These examples allows the user to view and manage data in a highly personalized way, defined by the user.

Individual Personalization through settings and preferences

The above are examples of explicit interactions, and is therefore a result of the users’ direct manipulation of the UI.

If we would take the same approach but put into a PLM application context it could be:

• Changes to color schema
• Filtering of content
• Hiding and moving UI components such as columns in a table or tabs/areas with blocks of functionality
• Setting up dashboards which would potentially aggregate and analyze information and then display it in a tasteful way
• “Clipboard” function which allows the user to put information into different buckets

Adaptive Design

But there is also something called implicit interaction, where the system adapts to the user and its context without the need for the user to interact with the UI directly. Some examples of this from the mobile world are when the background light changes on your device depending on the light around you or that depending on the movement of your device the text gets enlarged. In both case it’s something that allows the user to easier digest the information without having to tell the device what should be done to compensate for the conditions/context in which the information is digested.

A common usage of adaptive design in PLM applications is when the application is adjusted to the user’s profile. Roles, teams, skills etc can all be used to expose the user to a suitable set of information and functions.

There are also examples where adaptive design is attempting to use the situational and temporal context in which the user exists to create a better experience or more suitable set of information. Examples of that could be to adapt information to the location of user (geographically, inside or outside company network, etc), network connectivity or bandwidth.

Conclusion & What can we ask from the future?

We will “never” be able to know and anticipate what preferences the user has when it comes to how he wants to look at, work with, and analyze information. So the individual personalization is needed to create flexibility, at least when trying to address a larger user community.  I believe that personalization will have to be there in all the variants that we have today but more sophisticate. And that we will get more powerful capabilities to create dashboards, “feeds”, and searches which will allow the user to collect, view, and analyze information according to his preferences.

But here is an interesting observation; if you look at mobile apps you will not find that many personalization options which allows the user to adapt it. Instead they have to go for simplicity, where the app dictates how the user sees and uses the information. And still people get addicted.

So, what would happen if we join simplicity and personalization? Making the system adapt based upon users’ interaction with the it, instead of designing all preference and rules up front. Think “Recent opened” on steroids. Here are some examples on top of my mind how that could look like in a "PLM setting":

• Get reminders based upon patterns that has been found in how you act. Examples could be that you have a reoccurring event. Let’s say that you normally check for orders to approve on Monday mornings or that you check the deliveries against the GANT chart on Friday afternoons. Now the system reminds you that “hey, have you forgotten to do X?” and perhaps event provide you with the capabilities to actually perform what she things you should do.
• Or think of gmails categorization of your mails as important based upon how you have interacted with the sender in previous emails and chats, as well as which keywords that have been frequently occurring in the mails you recently have opened.
• Search is another area which could be hugely improved by being more “sensible” to both context but also by users previous usage

In the above discussion I used the word system or application (singular). The assumption was that we need to address the need of the individual using one application. But maybe we can agree on that working within processes actually makes you use multiple different applications. And instead of using PLM as a label for a system we use it as a label for the concept. Then what makes PLM mine is that “your” information is following you independently of which application you might have in front of you at a certain point in time. And that the information is the center of attention and the applications are secondary and transparent. That is what would really benefit the user and give the user the notion of my - that your information actually follow you in a coherent and consistent way across applications throughout the complete process. That independent of application you would have your dashboards, feeds, federated searches, subscription inbox, etc available. Collecting information and actions from different sources and applications.

What do you think? How will the future look like for enterprise systems such as PLM in terms of personalization? Will we aim to be more adaptive in system design? And what use cases do you see will trigger it?

Robert Wallerblad

www.infuseit.com

This %&$#?@! PLM Application!

Have you ever encountered bad user experience in a PLM tool? I have a few times. So how do we address user experience in enterprise software such as PLM Systems?

UI is only one part of UX

When thinking about user experience (UX) of an application you might associate it with words like nice and modern looking graphical user interface (GUI). But it is so much more – in its core it’s about understanding the end-users need and to make the work-tasks as simple, effective, and intuitive as possible. Level 1 is to address things such as consequent usage of interaction patterns, wording, icons and other features that you might associate with the GUI. But that doesn’t necessarily mean that you will develop the right features. You might still miss the actual goal of your implementation.

Understanding the user and the context

So, back to what I considered core – it´s all about understanding the context and the usage. Is the target an expert user? Then it might be important to have an effective pixel-usage, and advanced features, which might have some threshold to learn, but which is motivated by the value it provides. Or, is it aimed for the broader audience, where it has to be intuitive, self-explaining and with zero thresholds? To understand this you need to more or less work in the same way as any business analyst, grasping the essence and details of the tasks that you are about to develop a support for. To know the business impact goal of the implementation is an important part of this, as it sets the framework for whatever feature or function you are about to develop.  You can probably implement “a thing” in hundred different ways but only a few of them will match the desired outcome (e.g. better overview, higher efficiency, transparency, or traceability).

Another important thing, which is put to its extreme when working with customers in the fashion industry (as I do now), is the amount of data that the user is exposed to, and the speed in which the user has to perform his/her tasks. This means that every click counts – if you do thousands of product developments per season you will have some demand on the tools which is supporting your processes. Things which normally might be considered annoying become critical issues. And bad performance becomes show stoppers as the users find other ways to conduct their daily work. If you think about it, it’s not any different to any other industry. It’s just that the situation is more extreme which makes UX a good focal point for efforts made to make life easier to the end-user.

Don't lay the load on the user

A typical trap is to make things over-complicated. This is often found in PLM tools. Tools providing out-of-the-box capabilities often take the path to provide a function which is as generic as possible, allowing as flexible usage as possible. This flexibility is also manifested in the fact that every screen comes fully loaded with features. Something that you most probably can either configure, or use preferences to adjust. The issue is that none of that is actually done to enhance the experience. Actually, you will most likely find this in a lot of highly customized or bespoke software as well, and for the same reason – it is hard to take decisions which limits your options even if it for a good cause; to keep it simple. In many cases you need to take a stand and choose a path for the usage of the software to make it work in a streamlined and effective way - by not taking the decision yourself, you force it upon the end user.

To quote Steve Jobs;

“Simple can be harder than complex: You have to work hard to get your thinking clean to make it simple. But it’s worth it in the end because once you get there, you can move mountains.”

There is money to make from good design

The value of good design is not only about pleasing the end-user. Areas which contribute to a faster ROI are:

• Less need for support
• Less error prone
• Less need for user training
• More through-put
• More time spent on value adding tasks

But I have also heard some “softer” reasons for pushing for good design and that is to be able to appeal new, young, co-workers; you need to provide tools which don’t make the hair on their back stand up. That fight is not easy won as applications from the “consumer world” have transformed what we expect from an application in terms of usability. And mobile and cloud has done the same with availability, as we demand access from anywhere at any time.

What can we ask from the future?

I will not take the consumer and mobile path on this one, and I won’t take you to “star trek” millennia either…

Steve Krug’s book “Don’t make me think” is often mentioned when usability is discussed. Isn’t it time for someone to write the book “Don’t make me enter more information, please I beg you!”? I hope and believe that a lot of today’s tedious clicking and entering will be replaced by capabilities which will allow the user to shift focus from administrative to more value adding tasks. Aren’t we soon in the age of more intelligent PLM applications, which could enable more automated metadata creation? I'm not talking about mind-reading applications. It's more about utilizing the context in which the data resides, releasing data by moving out of the boundaries of native file formats, and borrow some from predictive coding. In short - don't make a human do the work that a machine can do.

Robert  Wallerblad
www.infuseit.com

*The title was inspired by the book "Jävla skitsystem" by Jonas Söderström